Old White Hipsters in Fezzes: The Ecumenical Heresy of the Moorish Orthodox Radio

Crusade
Two decades before he would rise to underground stardom with his text, Temporary
Autonomous Zone (1985), the spiritual anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson was initiated into
an obscure branch of the Moorish Science movement. Founded by Noble Drew Ali in
1913 as a syncretic form of African-American Islam, Wilsons introduction to Moorish
Science came in the early 1960s by way of an eccentric episcopi vagantes or wandering
bishop named Father Michael Itkin. The Noble Order of Moorish Science, in which
Wilson took the name Hakim Bey, was an improbable mix of Left-hand Christianity
and heretical Islam with psychedelic rituals, gay culture, and anarchism that acted as a
means for white people to join a predominantly African American (or Moorish)
religion. Along with Wilson, a number of white bohemians began to fill its ranks through
the 1960s, which precipitated a name change from The Noble Order of Moorish Science
to the Moorish Orthodox Church. Nearly nothing has been written on this contemporary
antinomian movement, and no scholar has examined its non-African American branch, of
which Wilson was a lifelong member.
Based on an on-going archive project undertaken by the author, this paper outlines the
history and development of Moorish Orthodox Science through the only public medium
in which it propagated itself, a non-commercial public radio show entitled The Moorish
Orthodox Radio Crusade. Airing from 1983-2012, this New York City-based radio show
operated as a platform for this marginal religion, as well as a means for other
underground, antinomian spiritual traditions to disseminate their messages. The material
used in the preparation of this paper has not yet been made public, and the analysis it
contains is derived from private recordings of this radio show, as well as personal
interviews with its creators. Special attention in this paper will be given to the discursive
self-representation of Wilson and his radio co-hosts as representatives of Moorish
Orthodox Science as well as their ongoing construction of the religion.

Christian Greer is currently working on his Ph.D. entitled Angelheaded Hipsters: From the Birth of Beatnik
Antinomianism to Psychedelic Millenarianism at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a M.A. in the
History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents from the University of Amsterdam and a M.Div.
from Harvard Divinity School. His recently published scholarly works include articles and book chapters
on the history of Chaos Magick in the US, Discordianism, and zine culture